Accessible Communication and Materials in Higher Education
Kelly Mack · 2022 · Proceedings of the 24th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility (ASSETS '22) · doi:10.1145/3517428.3550408
Summary
This doctoral consortium paper from a researcher at the University of Washington proposes a dissertation addressing two core areas of inaccessibility in higher education: inaccessible course materials (particularly slideshow presentations) and the breakdown of communication around accommodation fulfillment. The problem is significant — students with disabilities drop out of college at higher rates than nondisabled students, and only 2% of STEM workers are disabled compared to 10% of the overall workforce. The dissertation encompasses three projects. First, OpenSlide is a system that automatically detects and repairs accessibility issues in Google Slides presentations, integrated directly into the Slides interface as a pane. It identifies issues like missing alt text, uninformative link text (e.g., "click here"), missing slide titles, small font size, poor color contrast, and non-unique slide titles, providing both detection alerts and automatic repair capabilities. A key innovation is that OpenSlide can create multiple customized views of the same slides for different students — for example, one student with low vision might need very high contrast while another with dyslexia needs a specific lower-contrast font color. Second, OptiSlide uses optimization and natural language processing to automatically redistribute and rearrange slide content across slides when accessibility fixes (like increasing font size) cause content to overflow, using dynamic programming to balance three objectives: keeping content near its original position, respecting spatial relationships between elements, and grouping semantically related content together. Third, a qualitative study examines the accommodation communication process between three stakeholder groups: disabled students, professors, and disability service workers.
Key findings
Preliminary survey results from the accommodations communication study (6 professors, 10 students over one academic quarter) revealed several important patterns. The most common student accommodations were extra time on assignments and alternative testing environments. Students rated their accommodations as reasonably well fulfilled (M=4.55/5) but timing was inconsistent — about half were completed well before needed while the other half arrived just in time. Students had generally positive experiences communicating with professors (M=4.08/5), appreciating proactive professors but frustrated by missed emails and late responses. Only three students communicated with disability services at all. From the professor side, the most common accommodations they provided were turning on captions, giving extra time, and recording class. The hardest accommodation to fulfill was making PDFs accessible. Most professors (72.1%) spent 0-2 hours per week on accessibility, though two estimated 20+ hours during certain weeks. Professors were generally positive about student communication (M=4.37/5) but had poor experiences with disability services — one rated the experience 1/5, saying "They don't respond. They do not care. We escalated this and were told they are too busy." The concept of "access conflicts" — where one student's accessibility needs conflict with another's — was identified as a key challenge that Universal Design for Learning checklists fail to address.
Relevance
This research addresses accessibility barriers that every educational institution faces, making it highly relevant for accessibility practitioners working in education technology, content creation, or institutional accessibility. The OpenSlide and OptiSlide tools tackle a ubiquitous problem: slideshow presentations are used across virtually all departments yet remain consistently inaccessible, with issues like missing alt text and small fonts that disproportionately affect students with visual, learning, and cognitive disabilities. The approach of automatically detecting and repairing accessibility issues — rather than relying solely on creator awareness and effort — represents a scalable strategy applicable beyond slides to documents, websites, and other content. The concept of personalized, per-student accessible views of the same content is particularly innovative, acknowledging that accessibility is not one-size-fits-all and that access needs can conflict. The accommodations communication study highlights systemic failures in how institutions fulfill their legal obligations under the ADA and Section 504 — not because of bad intent, but because of inadequate tooling, unclear communication channels, and under-resourced disability services. These findings should inform the design of learning management systems and institutional workflows.
Tags: higher education · accommodations · document accessibility · slideshows · automated repair · disability services · universal design for learning · accessibility testing
Standards referenced: ADA · Section 504